Cuba announces new pro-market reforms amid threats of a military attack from US President Donald Trump’s administration.
The United States has announced a new series of economic sanctions targeting Cuba, its latest step in a campaign to squeeze the island’s already fragile economy.
The US State Department said on Thursday that it was sanctioning several Cuban companies and ۳۱-year-old Fidel Ernesto Castro, grandson of ۹۵-year-old former leader Raul Castro.
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“Cuba’s Communist regime elites preside over a failed state where ordinary Cubans go hungry,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a social media post on Thursday.
Since January, President Donald Trump has undertaken a heightened campaign to weaken Cuba’s government, in an effort to spur regime change.
Part of that campaign has been a series of escalating sanctions, as well as a de facto fuel blockade. Cuba had already been under a historic, decades-long US embargo that stretches back to the Cold War.
But Rubio argued that further actions were necessary to penalise Cuba’s leadership for decades of mismanagement and repression.
He further accused Cuba of seeking to “export subversive Marxist ideology to the United States and other states in the Western Hemisphere”, echoing Trump’s assertions that the island is a national security threat.
Since the start of the heightened pressure campaign in January, Cuba has taken steps to defuse the criticism.
In June, it passed its biggest free-market reforms in decades, with ۱۷۶ new measures. It has also conducted prisoner releases as a “humanitarian and sovereign gesture”.
On Thursday, further reforms were announced, with ۳۴ pages of legal changes designed to loosen regulation and state control in industries like tourism.
Under the new rules, private companies will be able to establish tour and travel agencies, separate from the Cuban government. They also will not have to contract employees through state agencies.
It will also become easier for some domestic investors to open foreign bank accounts.
But such steps have thus far done little to placate the Trump administration.
Since the start of the year, the US has repeatedly threatened Cuba with military intervention, and its sanction campaign has continued.
Critics warn that the sanctions, combined with the ongoing energy blockade, have pushed the country’s power grid and healthcare systems to the point of collapse.
Volker Turk, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, stated in June that such restrictions were “directly harming Cubans” and called for their end.
“Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines,” said Turk. “This is unacceptable.”
Rubio, on the other hand, has argued that Cuba’s government, a thorn in the side of Washington since the leftist revolution of ۱۹۵۹, is responsible for the island’s poor economic conditions.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez accused the US of fabricating threats as a pretext for pressuring the country, in an interview published in the state-run newspaper Gramma on Thursday.
“The truth is that Cuba does not threaten US national security or the US economy, nor does it wish to do so,” he said. “The accusation that Cuba allegedly sponsors terrorism actually reveals the US government’s lack of seriousness.”
In addition to targeting the Castro family, Thursday’s new sanctions cover two companies involved in Cuba’s nickel mining industry, two companies active in Cuba’s flagging energy sector, including an oil import company, and Banco Exterior de Cuba, a state-owned bank.
